Interferometric Satellite Data in Structural Health Monitoring: An Application to the Effects of the Construction of a Subway Line in the Urban Area of Rome
Author(s): Giulia Delo, Marco Civera, Erica Lenticchia, Gaetano Miraglia, Cecilia Surace, Rosario Ceravolo
More info: In recent years, the use of interferometric satellite data for Structural Health Monitoring has experienced a strong development. The urban environment confirms its fragility to adverse natural events, made even more severe by climate change. Hence, the need to carry out continuous monitoring of structures and artefacts appears increasingly urgent. Furthermore, satellite data could considerably increase the feasibility of traditional Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) approaches.This study aims to explore this remote sensing approach, focusing on the representation techniques that can be adopted to highlight their advantages and provide an interpretation of the results. In particular, the study analyzes records from the urban area of Rome (Italy), subject to the construction of a new subway line. These data are exploited to create a velocity map to highlight the possible subsidence phenomenon induced by excavations. Then, the paper focuses on single buildings or building complexes through the entropy–energy representation. Beyond the different limitations caused by the input data, a correlation is identified between the results of the two representation techniques. Accordingly, the effects of excavation on the urban area are demonstrated, and the methodologies are validated.
2022 | Journal Articles
Post Un-Lock. From Territorial Vulnerabilities to Local Resilience
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Patrizia Lombardi, Angioletta Voghera
More info: This open access book builds a framework that holds together numerous open issues in territorial planning: from the understanding of territorial, landscape, environmental and climatic dynamics to the analysis of local vulnerabilities, to the use of modern survey techniques to support planning. What is the role of urban and regional planning in achieving the sustainable development goals of our communities considering the major issues posed by the COVID-19 pandemic in urban planning? And how do these medium- and long-term objectives interact with the needs that the emergency has given rise to? Post Un-Lock—from territorial vulnerabilities to local resilience—aims to provide the reader with a useful key to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a catalyst for a restart based on the concepts of sustainability and resilience. In fact, the COVID-19 experience evidences the need to propose a planning system able to integrate multiple scales according to an interdisciplinary approach focused on in-depth knowledge of the territorial risks and vulnerabilities. Besides, with the contribution of the new technologies, it is able to rethink spaces on a neighbourhood scale, conceived as a "local resilience unit" that ensures the population high standards of safety, liveability, and accessibility to proximity services. In this view, planning is increasingly concerned about social aspects and the well-being of communities, supported by indicators and evaluation tools. With the proposal of the concept of local resilience unit, Post Un-Lock takes a step forward towards the definition of a new paradigm of local planning and a topic for urban regeneration.
2023 | Book Editing
Mainstreaming Energetic Resilience by Morphological Assessment in Ordinary Land Use Planning. The Case Study of Moncalieri, Turin (Italy)
Author(s): Danial Mohabat Doost, Alessandra Buffa, Grazia Brunetta, Stefano Salata, Guglielmina Mutani
More info: Energetic resilience is seen as one of the most prominent fields of investigation in the upcoming years. The increasing efficiency of urban systems depends on the conversion of energetic production of buildings, and therefore, from the capacity of urban systems to be more rational in the use of renewable resources. Nevertheless, the integration of the energetic regulation into the ordinary urban planning documents is far from being reached in most of planning processes. In Italy, mainstreaming energetic resilience in ordinary land use planning appears particularly challenging, even in those Local Administrations that tried to implement the national legislation into Local Building Regulation. In this work, an empirical methodology to provide an overall assessment of the solar production capacity has been applied to selected indicators of urban morphology among the different land use parcel-zones, while implementing a geographic information system-based approach to the city of Moncalieri, Turin (Italy). Results demonstrate that, without exception, the current minimum energy levels required by law are generally much lower than the effective potential solar energy production that each land use parcel-zone could effectively produce. We concluded that local planning processes should update their land use plans to reach environmental sustainability targets, while at the same time the energetic resilience should be mainstreamed in urban planning by an in-depth analysis of the effective morphological constraints. These aspects may also represent a contribution to the international debates on energetic resilience and on the progressive inclusion of energy subjects in the land use planning process.
2020 | Journal Articles
Co-evolutionary, transformative, and economic resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Evidence-based experiences of urban community design in Turin (Italy)
Author(s): Cristina Coscia, Angioletta Voghera
More info: This article seeks to interpret co-evolutionary and transformative resilience in a broad sense, with the aim of understanding how it may come into the practices of urban planning and project-making, innovating project procedures, and generating economic effects. This article studies this through the case of Bottom up!, the Turin-based Festival of Architecture, and observes the procedures through which resilience takes action in different territories, inter-preting territorial problems and crises such as the pandemic, viewing them as opportunities to innovate the system, suggesting integrated action on the natural, cultural, financial and social capital, experimenting with new practices, and holding institutions accountable.
2022 | Book Section
Territorial Resilience: Toward a Proactive Meaning for Spatial Planning
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Rosario Ceravolo, Carlo Alberto Barbieri, Alberto Borghini, Francesco de Carlo, Alfredo Mela, Silvia Beltramo, Andrea Longhi, Giulia De Lucia, Stefano Ferraris, Alessandro Pezzoli, Carlotta Quagliolo, Stefano Salata, Angioletta Voghera
More info: The international debate on resilience has grown around the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to natural disasters, with a growing interest in holistically understanding complex systems. Although the concept of resilience has been investigated from different perspectives, the lack of understanding of its conceptual comprehensive aspects presents strong limitations for spatial planning and for the adoption of policies and programs for its measurement and achievement. In this paper, we refer to “territorial resilience” as an emerging concept capable of aiding the decision-making process of identifying vulnerabilities and improving the transformation of socio-ecological and technological systems (SETSs). Here, we explore the epistemology of resilience, reviewing the origins and the evolution of this term, providing evidence on how this conceptual umbrella is used by different disciplines to tackle problem-solving that arises from disaster management and command-control practices to augment the robustness. Assuming the SETSs paradigm, the seismic and structural engineering, social sciences and history, urban planning and climatology perspectives intersects providing different analytical levels of resilience, including vulnerability and patrimony from a community and cultural perspective. We conclude that territorial resilience surpasses the analytical barriers between different disciplines, providing a useful concept related to complex problem-solving phenomena for land use planning, opening a new research question: how can territorial resilience be measured, acknowledging different units and levels of analysis aiding decision-making in spatial plans and projects? In attempting to understand a resilient system, quantitative and qualitative measurements are crucial to supporting planning decisions.
2019 | Journal Articles
Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Alessandra Faggian, Ombretta Caldarice
More info: The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”. It was applied in planning at th...e end of the last century as a concept that encourages policies to face stress factors and react by renewing and innovating cities. Resilience becomes instrumental in addressing both causes and effects of significant global challenges. As it motivates the transformative potentials of cities, resilience is commonly named “co-evolutionary resilience” or, most recently, “transformative resilience”. Following this more profound meaning, resilience is not only the opposite of vulnerability but also a “broad concept”, whose final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events together with the improvement of the environmental and social quality of a territorial system. In a nutshell, this approach characterises resilience as a territorial systems’ capacity to respond systemically and dynamically to the present and future shocks related to significant global challenges through non-linear transformation processes. Such processes involve the natural and anthropic characteristics of a territorial system, their performance, quality, and functions. Although the theoretical debate on resilience is deeply investigated, several methodological challenges remain mainly related to the concept’s practical sphere. As a matter of fact, resilience is commonly criticised for being too ambiguous and empty meaning. At the same time, turning resilience into practice is not easy to do. We need to measure resilience because its assessment allows consideration of what resilience is practical and what it is possible, and at which point resilience is realistically likely to fail. This will be arguably one of the most impactful global issues for future research on resilience.
The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?”
The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?”
2021 | Journal Articles